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Tuesday, 2 June 2015

Sabah's Finale and Catching Up

Our Sabah journey continued with food meetups with Sonya’s
friends. It was great to get to know each of them little by little while
enjoying good food. On top of that, all of them were extremely kind in treating
us to those meals.

Our trips included a visit to the traditional banana leaf
rice with refillable rice and vegetables which of course was eaten by hand.

We ordered loads of dim sum for breakfast on our last morning
in Sabah before our departure back to Kuala Lumpur. Numerous dishes full of steamed
goodness were ordered and thoroughly enjoyed

In particular, the lau sa pau (sweet and salted duck egg steamed
bun) was very popular. We ordered 11 batches which had 3 buns each, which
resulted in 33 steamed delicious buns.

Sonya introduced us to one of the local Sabahan fruit – the salak. Which I must say was not exactly
the taste I expected and therefore didn’t really enjoy it. However, I passed it
over to the local receptionist who proceeded to share it with the other
backpackers.

As it was the Pesta Keamatan (Harvest Festival), there was a huge event run by the Kadazan-Dusun Cultural Association which featured many traditional costumes, art forms, food and merchandise. Snagged myself a beautiful henna tattoo for only RM15 also known as 3 euros by one of the locals there while enjoying the diversity of cultures!

Thompson and Phoebe brought us to the Tanjung Aru beach
where we watched the beautiful sunset while enjoying our delicious fruit
smoothies.

Athiei’s 3-in-1 smoothie – dragon fruit, mango and avocado

After our adventures in Sabah, we had dinner with Dad at
Asia Café where we ordered dishes including pisang
cheese (fried banana fritters with cheese sauce), kangkung belacan (fried veggie with spicy shrimp paste), oysters in
fried egg, lobak (fried varieties of
fish cake and more) over chats. Athiei got to meet Dad for the first time too.

Then Dad brought us out for breakfast the following day at
the iconic VillagePark which serves well-known nasi lemak (rice cooked in coconut milk
with spicy sambal paste, cucumber, fried egg, anchovies and peanuts)

Then we ended our adventure by going through Ikea where Dad
picked up a few thing-a-ma-bobs.

This budak (boy)
came over to visit – a long time little brother I had since he was 7 and I was
10. Caught up over chats at the place together with…

Afiq! Both of these boys were my juniors in both primary and
secondary school where I was a prefect for their class for 3 years. So it kind
of ended in a big sister-little brother friendship. T’was really lovely to catch
up with them.